Category Archives: Music

In the last quarter of the 19th century — USA-centrically, call it 139 years ago — we began to experience having the sound of strangers’ voices in our lives, even in our homes. Not just voices, but music from concert halls and clubs. And other sounds, too: the clip-clop of horse feet, the slam of a door, a gun-shot. Less than 100 years go, those sounds went electric, and we never looked back.

At the beginning of the 20th century, we started another love affair — this one with moving images on rectangular screens, a dance of light and shadow, windows to imaginary worlds. Or windows to recorded memories or news of distant places. When sound went electric, those moving images took voice and spoke and sang. No one alive in our society today remembers a time when moving images weren’t woven into our lives.

Here, now, into the 21st century, in an age of streaming video and music, from cloud to your pocket device (with its high-resolution display and built-in video camera), I can’t help but be impressed by how far we’ve come.

This blog is nearly four years old (I started on July 4th, 2011). This post makes it exactly 500 posts here on Logos Con Carne. To commemorate it, I’m giving myself the 500 Odometer Award (which I built myself from various electrons I had laying around).

As part of the party, this post consists of miscellaneous odds and ends that have intrigued me lately. I’ll leave it to you to decide which are the odds and which are the ends.

Countdown reaches zero; engines start; the duodecad comes to life. We have Christmas Lift Off! (“The partridge is in the tree.” Repeat: “The partridge is in the tree.”) Christmas has launched! Today is the first of the Twelve Days of Christmas. On your mark, get set, go!

Two years ago at this time I was reeling from being Freshly Pressed. To this day no other post has so many readers or comments. (Just another irony in a life where they’re as common as Tribbles.) The final Way-Back links are to Christmas Thoughts and Christmas Afterthoughts (the latter of which has the poem I wrote about being FP — the former is about lefse and lutefisk).

It’s Christmas Eve Day! When I was growing up the evening consisted of the special family dinner and dessert, a Christmas lesson, opening the presents under the tree, all capped off with a midnight church service. Christmas morning brought stuffed stockings of trinkets and candy, but the Eve was the Big Night.

The Way-Back link is to the 2012 Christmas Eve post when I’d just learned that my Santa: Man or Woman post had been Freshly Pressed. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the poem I wrote to commemorate the discovery.

Some of you are back to work today; some of you took the week off to relax or get ready. Time is short, so get any last minute requests to Santa before it’s too late! (For the record, I have never written a letter to Santa. My parents never played the Santa Trick on me or my sister.)

The theme is Dear Santa (I Want), and the Way-Back link is to another neolithic share. This one containing two missives for Mr. Claus, one from a Ms. Barbara “Lawyer Barbie” Mattel (of the South Beach Mattels), and one from a Mr. Kenneth “Doll” Mattel (of the less well-to-do Redondo Beach branch).

Whoo-Hoo! Did you feel that? We just went around Darkness Corner. Not that circles have corners, but — zipping along at 67thousand miles per hour — we just swung past the point of longest night and shortest day.

For those of us north of the equator anyway.Those of you below it must regret the days starting now to get shorter. My condolences. (If it’s any consolation, the Earth’s speed is 107 thousand kilometers per hour.) Naturally the Way-Back link is to the 2012 Winter Solstice post.

After an analysis of Santa’s physical parameters, we’re still curious about the Claus. Does Santa, in fact, have claws? They would certainly help with chimneys. A question of quite some interest is: Does Santa have sex (in the biology class sense)? If so, ♂ or ♀?

The Way-Back link is to Santa: Man or Woman? It’s my only small claim to fame on WordPress — it’s the only post I’ve had Freshly Pressed! (How ironic it wasn’t a piece I actually wrote. It’s another fax or email “share” from the neolithic era of technology.)

Back in the days when fax machines were cool, “sharing” was a tiny trickle compared to the raging river of today. “Images” were black and white (not even grays) and 8.5″ x 11″ paper-sized. “Texts” were also that size, came in a variety of “fonts.” Both usually looked like something that had been photocopied 500 times.

Then as now there were gems. Here’s (a link to) one of them: Santa Claus: Fact or Fiction? It’s a trenchant treatise on the putative physical reality of Santa Claus. It considers some of the numbers involved, but I’ve never verified them, so be warned (38.5% of statistics are made up on the spot).